James Taranto points out interesting reporting on”illegally leaked” emails by the New York Times in today’s “Best of the Web” at the Wall Street Journal. Made me laugh.

— “The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.”–New York Times, on the Climategate emails, Nov. 20, 2009

— “The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. . . . The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match.”–New York Times, on the WikiLeaks documents, Nov. 29, 2010

Like this:

The great comedic actor is dead at the age of 84. Best known for his roles in Airplane!, Police Squad! and The Naked Gun, Leslie Nielsen has been acting since 1956, appearing in more than 100 films, and 1,500 TV shows. But it wasn’t until his deadpan performance of Dr. Rumack in Airplane! (1980) that Canadian-born Nielsen became known as one of Hollywood’s funniest funnymen. His career would never look the same.

Surely, he will be remembered as one of the best comedic actors of our time — and don’t call him Shirley.

President Obama modeled his “renewable energy” policies on Spain’s vast investments in wind and solar energy. So as they careen towards complete collapse they have finally settled on what they it hope will be the way out of the green subsidies and mandates that Obama admired so much. They have pulled the plug on solar subsidies. Alternative energy has been a disaster for Spain.

While Spain’s Socialist government tried to figure out how to pull the plug on all the green investments, the banks mentioned that they were on the hook for having underwritten the whole scheme, and could go under right along with the renewable bubble.

Dr. Gabriel Calzada, professor of economics, first exposed the truth about the bubble Spain was creating after President Obama told our country to look at Spain’s policies to see what a wonderful experience we had ahead. Professor Calzada ‘s research demonstrated that Spain’s energy policies were unsustainable without government subsidy; caused electricity rates to go up, not down; and cost more than two jobs in the regular economy for each “green” job. Calzada was badly treated by the Obama administration, the usual suspects in Congress, all the “green organizations’,” and trade unions in Spain: as well as Spanish ministers who sought to have Calzada fired from his university. Dr. Calzada was right, and unfortunately, Obama was wrong, and remains wrong. As Christopher Horner explains in his book Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America:

At the end of his campaign for president, Barack Obama boasted, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” He wasn’t blowing political smoke for the benefit of his supporters. He was telling us all who he is and his plans for us, as he affirmed even before his inauguration.

Barack Obama’s radicalism runs deep. When he crowed in San Francisco, “under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket,” he meant it. And it’s not just electricity prices that he wanted to skyrocket, but the costs of politically disfavored “fossil fuels.” As everything has the cost of energy embedded in it, costs will rise across the board. The result of these policies will be to crowd millions more toward energy poverty and dependence upon the state. That, too, is by design.

As the left sees it, if you do not coerce people out of their wretched levels of energy use, they will not change their lifestyles. In the Left’s view, these lifestyles must be changed because they are “unsustainable.”

“America has the greatest energy reserves in the entire world, and it is these resources that ensure our liberty,” Horner reminds us. From the first days of his administration, Obama began putting our own resources off-limits. Oil in the Gulf of Mexico has supposedly emerged from the moratorium, but somehow new drilling isn’t allowed, and one thing and another seems to prevent existing rigs to get back to work.

The coasts, East, West, and the coast of Alaska have all been put off-limits, citing “environmental” concerns. And as I noted below, the “threatened” nature of polar bears (probably soon to be raised to “endangered” ) puts offshore Alaskan waters off-limits. And the administration is working with Congress to put the massive new natural gas discoveries off-limits.

The “climate” agenda, “going green,” is not about environmental protection, and quite certainly not about the climate. It is about empowering a global bureaucracy. The Left’s agenda requires us to accept its “global governance” — not to be confused with a global government. It is about empowering a global bureaucracy, and curbing democracy, which must be sacrificed because climate change is so important.

Meeting the challenge of “global warming” became the emergency reason for pushing through the European “Constitution” in spite of citizen protests. And now an unaccountable and unrepresentative bureaucracy governs Europe as they choose, paying themselves ever more generous salaries and benefits, and increasing their power. And like all bureaucracies, their opinions of their own wisdom and infallibility greatly exceed reality. Europe is showing signs of coming apart.

And largely to blame are Europe’s huge subsidies for “green energy”. Denmark has invested in enormous amounts of wind energy, and has the highest prices of electricity in Europe. Germany went in for encouraging everyone to add solar panels to their homes, but that isn’t working either. A kilowatt of electricity costs 3 times as much in Germany as it does in the U.S. Britain has subsidized wind farms in places where there is no possibility of enough wind to make it cost-effective, and neglected clean nuclear energy to the extent that they are deeply worried about the death toll from the cold this winter.

The Left, always so dissatisfied with the freedom and prosperity of the United States, is sure that there is something better just around the corner when they are fully in charge.

But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Things are coming apart. Obama does not have the skill set to understand the problems he is faced with. People don’t believe in the dangers of climate change any more. Investing enormous amounts of money in wind farms that create most of their “green” jobs in China, and produce only tiny amounts of energy puts the lie to all the “sustainable” claptrap.

It’s bunk, and when Al Gore’s climate exchange goes bust, and he admits that the whole ethanol thing was a fraud, Americans just may get tired of being fooled.